This invention is in the field of laminated parts and their manufacture and more particularly electric motor or generator rotors and stators having stacked laminas and their manufacture.
Rotor and stator manufacture employing stacked laminas is well known in the art. Typically, the laminas are blanked from continuous strip stock and then stacked and bound together to form the rotor or stator. However, due to manufacturing tolerance thickness variations of the strip stock the rotor or stator could have a parallelism error, i.e. be out of conformance from a true right cylinder, thereby limiting close tolerance assembly of a rotor and a stator and operation thereof. This parallelism error occurs because in stacking the laminas the thicker portions of the laminas are directly overlying resulting in one side of the stack being higher than the opposite stack side causing a leaning or bending of the stack.
Also, in laminated rotor or stator manufacture a plurality of conductor slots are formed around the periphery of the rotor or stator stack in arcuately spaced relation to one another. If it is desired to skew the slot axes relative to the stack axis, it is common practice to index each lamina an arcuate increment relative to the next preceding lamina so that in a stack the axis of each slot is skewed or slanted relative to the stack axis. The amount of indexing has been achieved by manually operated clamps after the stack has been formed and by a manually adjustable stop which controls the degree of arcuate travel in each rotational increment. Other prior art systems are evidenced by the statements made in documents cited in the prosecution of this application. Due to the inexactness of the above described manual adjustments, skew inaccuracies and/or excessive adjustment time resulted. Other prior art systems are evidenced by the statements made and documents cited in the prosecution of the aforementioned U.S. Patent and copending application from which this application is a continuation.